


Vessels

by oschun



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 11:16:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oschun/pseuds/oschun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The intertwined back-stories of Sam and Nick or ‘How Sam once met Nick at Stanford’</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vessels

**Author's Note:**

> This came from rewatching 'Sympathy For The Devil' and thinking about Nick, his possible backstory and the parallels between him and Sam. Thanks to sylvanwitch for the beta and for loving Nick.

**Part One: We Were Always Going To Be Different**

He’s running through the woods at night, slipping and scrambling through the shadowy undergrowth, twigs scratching at his face, his heart pounding wildly in his ears. Something follows in the darkness behind him, slow and relentless, its breath hot on the back of his neck. He runs on and on, falls and gets up, falls again and drags himself up once more, his hands and knees stinging where they’ve been skinned open. On and on, until his legs and lungs fail him and he just can’t anymore. He’s looking for somewhere to hide, breathless and frantic, when the earth suddenly gives way under his feet. His stomach lurches as he falls. Fingernails tearing, he claws desperately at the ground, tries to haul himself out of the hole opening up underneath him. It widens relentlessly, a huge mouth swallowing him whole, closing tightly around his body. He’s waist deep and slipping further, up to his chest now, a crushing weight constricting his ribs. His arms get sucked in and the squeezing pressure is around his throat, soil falling into his open mouth, filling his nostrils. He spits and chokes on a scream.

“Shh, honey. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Warm arms lift him up and cradle him close, pulling him out of the suffocating grave of his nightmare. Her motherly warmth surrounds him and breaks through the horror of the dream world. Gasping for breath, he clutches her and burrows his face into the softness of her neck, the smell of her hair, the comfort and safety of her presence.

“Just a nightmare, Nicky. It’s just a nightmare.” She has one hand on his head, slowly stroking, as the other pats him gently on the back. She starts rocking backwards and forwards, a primal, soothing rhythm that he remembers from when he was little, and his eyelids start to droop, despite what he knows is hidden beneath the sheet and blankets. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. Doesn’t matter how many times he repeats it, he can still feel it from his waist down to his toes, as he does every night when he wakes from the dream. There’s a slippery, bloody secret waiting under the covers, fears made real, following him, slipping tip-toe through the cracks from the nightmare into the real world.

He can’t confront it while she’s in the room, so he forces his body to relax, wills his heartbeat to slow down, closes his eyes tight and tries to sound like he’s breathing slow and heavy. Eventually, she lets him go and feather-kisses the top of his head before standing up.

He can sense her pausing to look at him from the doorway, worried, her forehead crinkled and bottom lip reddened from biting it. Nick hates knowing that he puts that expression on her face, that he’s the cause of her unhappiness.

She leaves his door ajar, a hallway light on to keep the bogeyman at bay, and he lies rigidly under the covers until he hears the quiet snick of her bedroom door, the muffled, irritated sound of his dad’s voice, a flushing toilet, and then silence.

There are two choices: lie very still and pretend that it’s not there or suck up the courage to face it. Sometimes, if he ignores it, it does go away, and he can defeat its attempt to become real, refuse it the right to cross from its world into his. The waiting and pretending are terrible, though. More awful in a way than flinging back the sheet and being faced with all that blood: the heart-stopping terror of the second choice. But at least it’s just a moment. Anything more would make his heart turn into stone, make his mind crack like a mirror.

Made brave by his mom’s love and protection, he throws back the covers. The mattress is bleeding underneath him, seeping up from under the weight of his body, redder under his hips and the bony knob at the back of his foot, his heavy places. So much red. So much more real than older fears of nests of spiders hiding under the covers at the bottom of his bed, those fat tarantulas with their soft, silky hairs and lightly scraping fangs. Lie still as a mouse and they won’t bite you.

He whimpers and presses his lips tightly shut to stop himself from calling out. It’s been like this for weeks. He wakes every night from the nightmare of being buried alive to the safety of his own bedroom, a moment of relief, before he feels the wetness and knows that, if he lifts the covers, his bed will be soaked in blood.

At least it disappears immediately after confronting it. There and then gone again. A mirage.

He knows not to talk about seeing it. People who see things are crazy and get locked up like animals. They wear straitjackets and have electricity zapped through heads by masked doctors in white coats. Their brains are like broken machines. He’s never going to let anybody do that to him.

He hears them arguing downstairs the next morning.

“What the fuck’s wrong with him? It’s not normal for a kid to wake up screaming like that every night. He needs to see somebody, a professional. And you make it worse by treating him like a goddamn baby.”

His mom’s voice is low and reassuring, a murmuring counterpoint to his dad’s anger, but whatever she’s saying, it’s having no effect on him.

“I told you two years ago when he drew that disgusting picture that we needed to take him to see somebody. Didn’t I tell you? But you refused to listen. When it comes to him, you don’t listen to a fucking word that I say.”

The drawing. That had been a lesson learned: lie, pretend, fit in, and never let them see what’s in your head. Their teacher had asked them to draw a picture of the future, a time capsule project. He used to like drawing, liked the challenge of capturing a new world on paper, liked losing himself in his imagination. He’d forgotten where he was, furiously scribbling away at the back of the classroom, his hand almost moving by itself, out of his control.

His teacher’s expression had been open and unguarded, just for a minute, when she took it from him at the end of the lesson, fear and disgust on her face before she quickly hid her feelings away and quietly asked him to stay behind. Why had he drawn these terrible things? Did he think it was a joke? He hadn’t known how to answer, couldn’t explain the savage figures with blacked-out eyes, the burning church, the big, dead birds that looked like people with wings. It had looked worse next to the other drawings of flying cars, smiling robots and space rockets. Normal kids’ visions of a brightly colored, happy future.

His dad had worn that same expression when he came out of the principal’s office, his fear and disgust mingled with a familiar look of disappointment.

His mom made him his favorite dinner that night. Nick remembers the unexpected mid-week treat of chocolate ice cream for dessert. She got into his bed with him after his bath, like she used when he was younger, held him close as she read to him from one of his older, worn storybooks. A story about a noble quest, tasks to be performed, a villain to be defeated, a happy ending where the young hero restores order from chaos. He hadn’t complained that he was too old for fairytales.

His dad’s voice gets louder downstairs, shouting accusations at his mom’s silence. “He gets it from your side. If I’d known what I was getting into in the first place, that I was marrying into a family of fucking lunatics. You can’t keep pretending there’s nothing wrong. You and your lies. And he’s exactly like you, sneaky and secretive. I can’t stand this anymore.”

The front door slams loudly. There’s a sound of finality to it.

Maybe he is going mad. His inheritance from a dead granddad and an aunt he’s never met, the one who is locked away somewhere because she saw things other people couldn’t. He heard them arguing about it late one night. The truth about the car accident that killed her father and sister when she was still a little girl. There was no accident. It was a story she told to hide the fact that her father put a gun in his mouth one day and pulled the trigger. Her sister was still alive in a hospital where people weren’t allowed to leave because they couldn’t deal with the real world, because they might be dangerous to themselves and to the people around them. He could hear his mom crying as she told the truth and as she tried to explain why she’d lied.

His dad was the kind of person who didn’t listen to explanations, the kind of person who refused to understand why you had to lie sometimes. He went away and stayed away for almost a whole month. The day he left, she sat Nick down and told him that his dad would be back, that he still loved them.

In a way, it was better without him, the house a safer, quieter place without his anger and demands.

They tried hard after he came back that time, the two of them going out for dinner on Friday nights and leaving him at home with a babysitter, their date night. They spent weekends together as a family—hiking, camping, sports, community events, church fêtes—desperately trying to be happy and normal.

And then the nightmares started, irregular at first, then almost every night.

His bedroom door creaks open and his mom pauses in the doorway for a moment looking at him, wet streaks on her cheeks. She comes over and lies down next to him, holding him tight. She’s shaking. “It’s my fault,” he whispers to her. She squeezes him and tells him that it isn’t. He knows she’s lying. Why doesn’t he love me, he wants to ask, but doesn’t. He’s old enough to know that he’s never going to get answers to some questions.

“You’re special, Nicky,” she says. “Don’t let anybody ever tell you different. You’re going to do great things. You’re going to set the world on fire.” It’s what she always says to him, laying out a great adult future in word pictures before him. “Just me and you now, honey. Just the two of us. It’s going to be alright.”

And it is alright. Mostly. The bad dreams are like a constant backdrop to his growing up, but she’s always there to comfort him, to bring him back.

The years pass by and he masters the art of dissembling. He’s an actor playing the lead role in his own life. He’s a good student. He does normal things and has friends, the occasional girlfriend, but nobody gets too close. Only at home does he allow the mask to slip a little. His mom knows and accepts him. She’s the only audience to his otherness.

And he is different. Nick knows that. Not in the way that some of the other kids at school feel it with their self-inflicted exile in lonely bedrooms, their anger at their parents, their frustration with the rules and norms that don’t fit who they think they’re becoming. He’s different because he doesn’t feel any of those things. He pretends, but a lot of the time he doesn’t feel anything. It’s like he’s waiting for something. And whatever’s coming, it isn’t what his mom has promised or envisioned for him. He knows that too.

She becomes increasingly eccentric the older she gets, but she remains the safe buffer against his nightmares, the narrator of his happy adult future.

Until the day that her headaches start.

It’s quick, no more than six weeks, the cancer eating away at her until she’s pale, withered, bed-ridden, forgetting who he is and retreating further and further away from him. He spends most of his time at her bedside holding her limp hand and watching her slip away. He’s frightened by it, but if he’s honest, also a little fascinated. She fades like color, like light. He’s there at the end when all of it finally dies away, when her mouth drops open and the skin on her face settles close against her skull, her eyes open and unseeing. He doesn’t close them, even when it’s his first instinct. He doesn’t want to cheapen it. Make it feel like a movie. He kisses her paper-dry skin and whispers in her ear all the things he feels, her cheek cooling against his.

They bury her on a cold November morning. Even with the small huddle of black-clad strangers around him—distant family members, a few neighbors and some of her colleagues from work—he still feels like he stands alone at her graveside. His dad doesn’t come. He’s too busy with his own family. What would be the point?

Nick is eighteen years old and alone in the world.

*******

Drip, drip, drip. Three drops on his forehead. It wakes Sam up from that half-state between sleep and wakefulness. There’s a leaking stain in the cracked plaster of the motel ceiling directly above him. He sighs heavily and looks over at Dean in the other bed. Dean’s face is squashed into the pillow, mouth open and a wet patch forming on the pillowcase. Sam sighs again, louder this time, hoping to wake Dean up, irritated with him for no other reason than because Dean is his brother. It’s Dean’s fault that he’s lying under a leak. He chose the bed nearest the door, not because he wanted to protect Sam from some threat coming through it, but because he wants him to suffer a dripping water torture all night and not get any sleep while Dean lies in a dry bed.

Dean sleeps on, oblivious to Sam’s huffed attempts to wake him. It’s many years before Dean will grow up into the kind of man who sleeps with a knife under his pillow, instantly awake at the slightest sound.

Sam sighs again and wipes his forehead. His hand comes away dry, nothing there. He looks up at the ceiling, waiting for it to drip on him again. The darkness is deceptive, and as he watches it the stain seems to grow, to change shape and move position. When he blinks really hard, it jumps back into place and returns to its original size. He’s sure he felt something drop on him. He glares at the crack, willing it to do it again. It’s more stubborn than he is, though, and eventually his eyes get tired and itchy from staring. His eyelids start to droop.

He’s just dozing off, crossing the grey in-between world that borders dreaming, when something makes him open his eyes. His heart freezes in his chest when he looks upwards. The stain has turned blood-red above him and has grown to enormous proportions, covering most of the ceiling like a heavy, scarlet Rorschach monster. The ceiling groans under the weight of its saturated moisture, the heaviest point right above his head. Terrified, he opens his mouth to call out to Dean. No sound comes out: it’s as if his tongue and voice-box are missing, he can’t swallow, can’t make a sound. He tries to turn his head to look for Dean but his neck and limbs are clamped to the bed by invisible restraints.

The jagged-edged monster continues to grow, seeping outwards, spider legs creeping down the walls. A glow spreads across its wet surface, burning oil on water, and then it explodes into flames. Flinching, Sam tightly squeezes his eyes shut, horrified by the thought that his face is going to get burned off.

His pounding heart stutters when something starts to tickle his cheeks, something like soft, searching fingers, slipping behind his ears and down his neck. He’s too frightened to open his eyes. He could ignore it, pretend it’s not there. It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real. The room’s not burning. There’s no smell. Ceilings don’t bleed.

It doesn’t go away, and eventually he’s forced into opening his eyes. He chokes, throat dry and no tongue to swallow with. The ceiling has dropped to a couple of inches above his face, claustrophobically close, a shape under the carpet of softly rolling flames across its surface. A gust of air blows across it and the thing beneath the flames takes form more clearly, a face, lips so close he could reach up and kiss them. And that’s what he wants to do. It becomes a longing, a desperate need, but he can’t because his arms are glued to the bed. Long, blonde hair hangs down from the face—so close and so far way—teasing his cheeks and neck, soft seaweed in a gentle current.

“Sam, wake up!”

He ignores the distant voice, tries instead to make out the features above him and struggles to unclamp his arms so that he can reach upwards. He knows that it’s important.

“Sam!”

Waking up is like having to swim a long way up from the bottom of a deep pool towards a faintly glimmering light.

Dean’s gripping his shoulders, leaning over him, his anxious expression replacing the burning face of Sam’s dreams. He’s shaking Sam hard, so hard his teeth clatter together. Sam’s throat feels dry and hot and tight. It takes him a couple of attempts before he can find his voice to rasp, “Dean, stop shaking me.”

“Okay,” Dean says too loudly, suddenly letting go and moving back a little on the bed. He’s frowning, looking really worried. “You alright?”

Sam looks up at the blank ceiling, blinking, trying to clear his head. He pulls himself up, his body strangely heavy, and leans back against the headboard. “I think I was having a nightmare.”

“You think?” Dean’s still talking too loudly. “Dude, I was trying to wake you up for at least ten minutes. You were making these horrible choking noises. I got worried. What the hell were you dreaming about?”

Dean clicks his fingers in front of Sam’s face and Sam realizes that he wasn’t listening, glazing over as he tried to remember the nightmare, chasing after it before it got swept away completely.

Dean’s voice quietens. “Seriously, Sammy, you okay? That was really weird, the way you wouldn’t wake up.”

“I think I was dreaming about mom.”

Dean eyes him warily. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, I think so. I don’t know.”

Dean lifts his legs up on to the bed, leans back and settles his head against Sam’s crossed feet. His voice is slow, careful, when he says, “Okay, tell me about it. What was she doing?” He doesn’t really sound like he wants to know, though.

“It’s hard to explain. You know what dreams are like.” Sam shrugs and clenches his toes. The movement of his feet makes Dean’s head nod forward, as if in agreement with what he says. Dean shifts his head and just lies there, watching him, waiting for him to explain, his expression closed.

Sam’s scared and worried, wanting to put it into words but not knowing how to. He can’t remember anything specific or concrete about the dream anyway, just a sense of horrible dread. “It wasn’t really about Mom. It was about a spider, I think. This huge red spider.” It sounds stupid and childish, even to his own ears.

Dean snorts and abruptly gets up. “You shouldn’t watch horror movies before bed. Told you about that before.” He pats Sam on the head in a way that he would normally find patronizing but somehow finds quite comforting, then moves over to his own bed. It’s not enough, though. Sam needs something more from him. He wants to reach out, to hold onto Dean and not allow him to pull away. His hands clench at his sides. “Dean, can I sleep with you? There’s this crack in the ceiling that’s been leaking on my bed all night. Everything’s wet.” It comes out in a rush of words.

Dean doesn’t check to see if Sam’s telling the truth, just makes a grunting noise that Sam takes as permission to bring his pillow over and place it at the bottom of Dean’s bed. He slips under the covers, head to toe with his brother, and watches the stain on the ceiling from out of the corner of his eye, trying not to shiver.

“You kick me in the face and I swear you’re gonna lose a toe.”

“Shut up and stop stealing the covers,” Sam replies, stealthily moving a little closer to his brother’s warmth.

When he wakes up the next morning, Dean has one foot in his face and another tangled up inside his t-shirt. His heavy breathing borders on snoring. Sam looks at his brother’s familiar sleeping expression and considers suffocating him with a pillow. It’s either that or hugging him. Dean causes these conflicted feelings inside him. It’s so like Dean to not listen about his nightmare but then to allow him to sleep in his bed without giving him a hard time about it.

“I’m not going to school today,” he says when Dean cracks open an eye.

Dean grins sleepily into his pillow. “Yeah, me neither. Sam has declared it. There will be no school today.” He rolls over and pulls the pillow around his head with a contented grunt.

Sam digs a heel into his side. “You have to phone the school.” Dean gives a muffled groan, so Sam digs his heel a little deeper. “Make it convincing.”

Dean drags himself up, yawning and rubbing a hand through his pillow-flattened hair. “When am I ever not convincing?” he asks in a gruff imitation of Dad’s voice as he walks out the room.

Without the routine of school, the day stretches out in anticipation before them.

It gets hot and humid really early. The AC of the sleazy motel room that they’re staying in is busted and the swimming pool is an unappealing slime-green color, frog-spawn collecting around the rusting metal steps leading into it. There’s a muddy, slow-moving river running behind the motel that they decide to investigate instead.

The two of them follow a path that leads down to the river from the motel through shoulder-high, sunburnt grass, the sound of cicadas loud in their ears. Dean in front and Sam following him. The way it always is.

Dean finds a couple of fishing lines snarled in the reeds that grow thick on the riverbank, manages to unravel one, its hook caught in a submerged tree stump. He turns a stick into a makeshift fishing rod, chews on a reed hanging out the corner of his mouth and makes stupid Huckleberry Finn jokes as he sits cross-legged on the bank and tries to catch something.

“Like you ever read that book. Like you even know how to read.” Sam watches Dean, lazily sprawled under a tree with his head propped up against the trunk. He’s hot and bored and feeling a bit mean, Dean the only object to take it out on.

Dean glances over his shoulder. “Guess you forgot that I read it to you when you were younger, dipshit. Somebody left it in a motel room. Every night you used to beg me to read it to you. Dean, read me a story. Read me a story,” he mimics, his voice high and childish, hands clenched around an imaginary blanket pulled up to his chin.

Annoyed, Sam retaliates, “The only book you ever read to me was that stupid hospital romance somebody left in a room in Colorado. I remember you making up your own dirty details and me begging you to stop. I was like ten years old. That’s the only time I can remember you reading to me.”

Dean laughs. “The wet and wild adventures of Nurse Nightingale. Now that was a story.” He looks over his shoulder again and pins Sam with a glance. “But I also read Huck Finn to you. Problem with you is that you have a selective memory.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Dean looks away. “Nothing.”

“Just say it, Dean.”

Dean sighs, rolls his jeans up and lets his feet dangle in the river. “It’s just that you always remember bad stuff, and you hold on to it forever. With you, it’s like nothing good ever happens.”

“That’s not true,” Sam protests, surprised and offended by the criticism.

“Whatever.” Dean shrugs and kicks his feet underwater. Wavelets ripple out from his legs, getting smaller the further they move away.

Sam mulls it over in his head. “I just want something better for my life. Your problem is you always settle for less.”

“So we’ve both got problems.” Dean lies back on the riverbank, one arm cushioning his head, the other shielding his eyes from the sun.

They’re both silent for a while. The heat settles. A heavy, brassy light blankets everything, making the world still and quiet. Eventually, Sam says, “So our English teacher got us to write an assignment about a family memory, right?”

Dean grunts to show that he’s still awake and listening.

“So I wrote about us hunting that werewolf.”

Dean reacts in exactly the way Sam knew he would. He jack-knifes into a sitting position, twists around and hisses, “You did what?”

“Relax, Dean, it’s not like anybody’s going to believe that it’s true. The teacher reminded me that the assignment was meant to be non-fiction. Who would ever believe me?” He answers his own question. “Nobody.”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t talk about what we do, not to anyone, not ever.”

Sam hates it when he gets that tone. “Who says?” he asks with a sneer. “Dad?”

“No, Dad doesn’t need to say it. It’s a rule. It just is.” Dean gestures with his hand, throwing the idea of the rule out there with all the others that just exist somewhere in the ether for those who know and understand them. “It’s common sense. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself. That kind of thing makes teachers twitchy. You say and write weird shit and they’ll start psychoanalyzing you, thinking there’s something wrong with you. Then they’ll want you to go and see the counsellor and they’ll call Dad into the principal’s office.”

There is something wrong with me, Sam thinks. There’s something wrong with Dad, with our family, with you, with everything. “He said it was good,” he says aloud.

“What?”

“My story. He said it was well written.”

Dean turns over on to his stomach and watches Sam closely, his eyes narrowing.

“I get it, okay. Don’t talk about it to anybody else. I understand. I’m not stupid.” Sam throws a stone that he was playing with at Dean’s head. It misses and plops into the river. He lies back and ignores Dean, watching a single cloud making its cotton-wool way across the enormous blue of the sky. Closing his eyes, he can hear Dean sigh, can imagine him turning back to the river as he starts skimming stones across its flat, brown surface, the sound of them slicing through air and water. Some of them make it all the way across to the rocks on the other side, chipping and clattering against their hardness.

Sam’s drowsy and heat-hypnotized. It allows a memory to get dragged up from the back of his mind, one from a few years back when they were staying somewhere in Delaware.

He’d been sitting outside the office, waiting to enroll—the ordeal of yet another new school—when a kid was hauled past him by his angry dad. The other boy had turned around and given him a look of resigned suffering. Sam had returned it. A moment between them. The camaraderie of kids at the whim of adults. The dad was hissing something under his breath, something about a drawing and getting into trouble with the principal as he roughly jerked the boy by his arm. There was a tall, thin, sad-looking woman trailing behind them, probably the boy’s mother. She walked past a trashcan and slowly opened her hand to allow a piece of crumpled paper held between her fingertips to fall into it. Something about the deliberate way that she did it and the expression on the other boy’s face made Sam go over and pick it out of the trash after they’d rounded the corner.

He can remember smoothing the drawing out on his knee and the electrifying shock of seeing something not meant for his eyes, something significant and secret.

He didn’t see the boy again during the brief period that he’d been at the school, even though he’d looked for him.

He kept the drawing for a long time, didn’t show Dean or Dad, although he probably should have. He’d tried to work out what it meant, knew it must be something terrible, but couldn’t quite decipher it. It started intruding on his nightmares. Burning buildings. A garden filled with dead flowers and rotting fruit. Winged creatures scattered on the ground, dead and bloodied, their mouths open in silent screams. Hunched figures with coal-black eyes lurking in murky shadows. He finally tore it up into tiny pieces. It took a long time. The more he ripped, the worse the fragmented images appeared, little bits of decaying things and flames and feathered wings, pieces of a horrifying puzzle.

A spray of lukewarm river water startles him out of his thoughts. A handful of foul-smelling brown sludge follows, accompanied by laughter.

“We should go swimming.” Dean rinses off his muddy hand, stands up and pulls off his t-shirt. For a moment he’s caught in the refracted light from the water droplets on Sam’s eyelashes, all golden and haloed, irritatingly perfect.

Surprise on his side, Sam jumps to his feet and rushes Dean, his bony shoulder hitting him in the middle of his bare chest, propelling them in a tangle of limbs off the riverbank. They hit the water hard. Dean’s back taking the brunt of it. Sam’s slippery as an eel underwater, but Dean still manages to roll them over and pulls Sam under him. He pushes off Sam’s shoulders to lift his head above the water, clamps his hands over Sam’s head, legs around his body, holding him under the water until he’s thrashing, frightened and desperate to breathe.

“I hate you,” he manages to choke out when Dean lets him surface, water and snot running out of his nose as he gasps for air.

Dean grins, a flash of white teeth in the bright sunlight. “No, you don’t. You think you hate me. But you don’t.” He kicks away from Sam and swims a little way upstream to where the river cuts sharply into a steep embankment and climbs up it, using exposed tree roots as hand-holds, his feet slipping on the muddy rocks. He gets to the top and beats his chest like King Kong, a happy, crazy grin on his face as he looks down at Sam.

And it’s true, Sam doesn’t hate him. Sam loves Dean so fiercely that it’s frightening. But Dean’s so secure in Sam’s love for him, so self-assured, that sometimes it makes him want to hurt Dean. He’d like to prove to his brother that he can’t always take him for granted. It’s a traitorous thought and one that gives him some guilt as he treads water, watching Dean take off his soaking jeans and hang them over the branch of a tree.

Sam pushes disloyal notions out of his head and swims over to climb up the muddy embankment, allowing Dean to reach down and haul him up the final stretch. He strips off his wet clothes and hangs them in the tree next to Dean’s.

They goof around for a few hours, cannon-balling into the river, racing each other from one side to the other, seeing who can hold their breath the longest underwater. The sun eventually reaches its meridian and they laze in the muddy shallows until a debate about what constitutes the perfect hamburger turns hunger into an insistent growl. They get dressed and trudge back up towards the motel in soggy sneakers and stiff, sun-dried clothes.

“It wasn’t Huck Finn, it was Tom Sawyer. It’s a different book,” Sam says, following Dean on the path cutting through the long grass.

Dean turns around and smirks at him. “You’re such a brat. I knew you remembered.”

“What I remember is you stuttering over the big words. That’s because you’re barely literate. You should concentrate in class and spend less time thinking about girls or guns or whatever it is that you fantasize about.”

Dean sarcastically mimics his use of the word literate and calls Sam a geek as he hauls him in for a noogy. “NRA calendar girls in tiny bikinis with really big guns, Sammy. That’s my favorite fantasy.”

“You’re an idiot,” Sam says, not for the first time that day, and pushes Dean away so that he can smooth his hair back down.

When he looks up, Dean gives him this exaggerated girl-pout and starts mincing up the path like he’s wearing high heels. He turns around and aims an invisible handgun at Sam, winks, pulls the trigger, then blows the top of his barrel-finger. It’s about the most ridiculous thing that Sam has ever seen. Dean in his rolled-up jeans with his t-shirt wrapped like a turban around his head pretending to be a Bond girl. He bursts into laughter, pushes Dean off the path and races him back to the motel, grinning the whole way. Dean, the cheat that he is, tries to trip him up, but Sam’s lighter and faster than he is.

Dean gets them takeout for dinner: enormous hamburgers dripping with a secret barbeque sauce that he buys from a small family-run place in town and brings back to the motel. They eat outside at the pool, sitting on rusting chairs and watching the biology project happening in the shallow end. Licking his fingers, Dean pronounces the hamburgers in the top five list of Best Burgers Ever. Sam disagrees, putting them at about number eight. They debate memories of meals, mapping the places they’ve been in takeout and diners.

It’s just an ordinary day. Dean is irritating. Sam’s life is tainted by nightmares, by guilt over cutting school, by worry about his dad, by longing for a house with a real kitchen in it. These remain universal truths. But when Sam looks back on it, years later, it’s a day perfectly fossilized in amber. A sunny, stolen, carefree day. Back when things were simpler, before him and Dean got all broken up, before they got screwed over by demons and angels, back before they became strangers to each other.

**Part Two: A Long Way From Home**

After his mom’s funeral, Nick feels swamped by inertia and depression. Some days he can hardly get out of bed. He ignores the doorbell and the phone, leaves the mail unopened and survives on the groceries that Mrs Fisher from next door leaves on the porch.

The future stretches out in front of him like an endless highway at night, no road-signs in the dark. There’s no way he’s going to college, even though that’s what his mom wanted. He’s almost glad she isn’t around to be disappointed by him. Her promise that he would set the world on fire seems laughable now. He does have moments, though, where he seriously thinks about setting the house on fire, just burning it to the ground so there’s nothing left, so that he can be free. But he can’t bring himself to do it.

On a bleak, wintry Wednesday, about a month after the funeral, he realizes what he needs to do. He writes a letter to his asshole dad and another to his mom’s lawyer, packs a bag, drops the keys in an envelope through Mrs Fisher’s door and heads for the bus station.

Maps are weird. They’re deceptive. All those dots and colors and squiggly lines that are meant to represent endless bus journeys or hitched rides, places, people, new beginnings. It’s only when you’re out there and lost in it that you really get it. He moves from town to town and state to state, learning, growing, becoming harder. He can feel that toughening inside himself like a callous, identical to those on the palms of his hands. He lies about his age, sometimes his name. It’s funny how easy it is to just disappear, to become somebody else.

His mom left him some money, a college fund that she squirreled away for years, but he tries not to dip into it unless he needs to, picking up casual jobs wherever he goes, earning easy money and cash that comes hard and costs more than what it’s worth. In Colorado he gets involved with some guys running stolen car-parts out of an auto-repair place he’s working at and ends up in the hospital with a knife wound after things go wrong on a deal. He leaves, driven by the constant need to move on, with a jagged scar down his side and with a better understanding of how that other world works, the world that exists for so many people outside the boundaries of laws and taxes and picket fences.

Like a movie cliché, he keeps heading west, searching for the Promised Land.

When he finally hits California, he falls hopelessly in love for the first time in his life. It happens immediately on the first night that he spends camped on the beach by himself watching the sunset flame red on the waves. It’s like he finally found his place in the universe. The enormity of the ocean, the power, cruelty and loneliness of it, humbles him. It’s the first time that he’s ever felt so connected to anything.

He gets a part-time job in a surf shop, deals a little weed and ecstasy on the side, and tends bar three nights a week at a rowdy place filled with fishermen and divers, guys with an almost amphibian connection to the water. He stops recognizing himself in the mirror, skin the dark color of oak, hair twisted into bleached blond dreads, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes from constantly squinting at the horizon, the surfer’s gaze.

Diving becomes an addiction. Returning to the surface is a come-down after the euphoria of that magical blue world. The nightmares still wake him up in a cold sweat most nights, but on the nights when they don’t, he dreams about being deep under the silent sea, breathing water easily, the noise in his head finally drowned out.

He’s genuinely content for a short time, but it doesn’t last. It’s a girl that changes things.

Nick attracts a certain type of girl. Mostly they’re smart, hot, well meaning girls with college educations and political slogans on their t-shirts. Girls who want to save him. Occasionally they’re smart, hot, really fucked-up girls who want to wreck him. It’s often hard to tell the difference.

He leaves the siren call of the sea behind him for a beautiful redhead who seems to fit the former category and follows her to Palo Alto when she gets into Stanford.

It takes about six months for her to realize that he’s not salvageable. That’s the amount of time it takes for the well meaning ones to scratch beneath the surface. The damaged girls get him a whole lot sooner.

“Do you know what your problem is, Nick?” she asks him on the night that she kicks him out.

It’s rhetorical, but he answers anyway. “No, but I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

Her eyes flash fire and he hardens a little. He can’t help it. He likes her when she’s angry, her face flushed and animated, so pretty against her mane of red hair. So much more interesting than her usual adopted expression of intellectual disdain.

She gives him a knowing look, a sneer curling her upper lip. “You’re a hollow man. Absolutely empty. Nothing here.” She taps her chest to illustrate her point. “You’re not mysterious, you’re just vacant. I thought you were interesting, that I’d find something going on behind that front you put up, but there isn’t, is there, Nicky? There’s nothing behind the mask.”

“You were never going to be the person to find it, even if you were really looking. Which you weren’t,” he replies. She’s a narcissist and is never going to see anything but her own reflection in everybody around her. It’s not worth telling her, though. He’s already thinking about whose couch he’s going to be sleeping on tonight.

“Jesus, you’re a cold bastard.”

She’s crying, which surprises him, mascara running in thin black rivulets down her face.

“Nature abhors a vacuum, Nick.”

She says stuff like that, clichés she’s picked up from somewhere. Any time she wants to prove a point, it has to include a reference to something. That’s what too much education does to people. Turns them into a walking bibliography of other people’s ideas. You really should read more, she always says to him when he doesn’t get a reference to some academic or Nobel Prize winner.

He starts mentally packing, cataloguing things that he needs to remember and wonders whether he can get away with taking the expensive carving knife they bought together when he leaves. She insisted on spending a small fortune on it, told him that it was an important investment. She was right. It’s a really good knife. The blade hardly ever needs sharpening and the weight of it is perfect in his hand. The things you learn from people.

“You need to be careful, Nicky. Nasty things crawl into empty shells when you’re not looking.”

The CDs won’t be difficult. Anything cultural and political played on African drums and sitars belongs to her.

“You’re not even fucking listening!”

He refocuses his attention on her, tries to adopt a suitably sombre expression and doesn’t say there’s no reason for him to listen to her. She’s the one who’s ending it. How is he the bad guy?

She stands there staring at him, chest rising and falling like she’s struggling to breathe, her skin pale. “I wanted you to be different, to be something else.”

That’s what they all want. He looks steadily back at her and shrugs. What can he say? She isn’t who he wanted her to be either. People are disappointing if you rely too much on them for your own happiness. He’s hardly ever disappointed because he’s mostly self-sufficient. He probably should have told her that from the start.

“Say something for fuck’s sake!”

He could, but he doesn’t. Casual cruelty would be too easy.

“You’re going to do something really awful one day. I just know it,” she whispers, her eyes widening as she says it, like the words come as a surprise, even though she’s the one voicing them.

His skin prickles, an icy premonition running up his spine and raising the hairs at the back of his neck. He shakes it off, but before he can reply with Melodramatic much? she turns away from him and pours a glass of wine on the kitchen counter behind her.

Her back still to him, she says, “But you’re not my responsibility. I can’t help you.” She drinks some of the wine, takes a deep breath and turns around to face him. “You should leave now.”

He does, holding on to his silence.

He’s not angry. He isn’t. He’s still trying to convince himself of that as he picks up a bicycle leaning against the wall outside the apartment block and smashes it into the windshield of her car parked at the kerb. He ignores the shouts behind him and stalks off down the street.

Okay, so he’s a little pissed. He needs to get drunk and get laid. Tomorrow he’ll start thinking about what he’s going to do next. He’ll get the map out and start again.

He goes to the bar where he’s been working since he arrived in Palo Alto. Emily’s there and a welcome sight. Nick has a lot of respect and affection for Emily. They’ve gotten to know each other pretty well over the past six months. She’s feisty, sharp as nails, and has an irrepressible, wicked sense of humor, despite that she’s had to fight hard for everything she’s got. She’s doing law at Stanford and is going to make a frighteningly good prosecutor some day.

She takes one look at his face and starts laughing. Nick pulls up a stool and scowls at her intuitive ability to read him. She lines up six shot glasses in front of him and loudly announces to the crowd at the bar, “Somebody call a doctor. There’s a wounded man in the house. The diagnosis is a broken heart.”

He gets a round of applause, some sniggered comments and a couple of sympathetic looks.

“Fuck you, Emily,” he growls quietly. “Did you get shorter and become psychic since the last time I saw you?” She’s five two in heels and sensitive about her height.

“It’s got nothing to do with being psychic, sweetie.” She smirks at him, fills the glasses with whiskey and loudly addresses everyone at the bar again, “Scratch that. We’re going to need a coroner. It’s a wounded male ego and therefore fatal. Anyway, everybody knows that Nick has no heart.”

A chorus of comments follows. Nick half-rises in his seat and mock bows to his audience, raises one of the shots. “Fuck all of you. I hope you get the clap.” There’s another round of hooted replies and raised glasses in honor of the inglorious end to love that is Gonorrhea.

Nick sits back down, clinks his glass against Emily’s and throws it back. “You really are an insensitive bitch,” he says, screwing his face up against the burn.

She swallows one of the shots, and because she’s a show-off, downs a second without a flicker of a grimace.

This is exactly what he needs. Emily is insanely fun to get drunk with. One time, Nick watched her drink ten shots in under an hour, holding her own against some bikers she was trying to impress until she fell over mid-sentence, absolutely straight-limbed like a very short tree. One minute she was standing, talking without slurring and then she just fell over sideways, passed-out and impossible to wake. She also likes to dance on the bar and has a tendency to take her clothes off in public.

“All yours, big boy.” She pushes the glasses towards him.

He gives her a disappointed look. “Where are you going? I need you. I’m hurting.”

She gives him a shrewd look. “No need to pretend here, Nick. It’s not like you were in love and it’s not like you didn’t know the end was inevitable. I feel sorry for her, not for you. And yes, you can stay at my place tonight because I’ll be over at his place.”

She winks at a besotted looking guy sitting at the end of the bar in a stool that is reserved for Emily’s conquests. “My shift’s over. Mi casa is not your casa so do not mess with my stuff. And sleep on the couch, not in my bed.” She picks up her bag and coat from behind the bar, throws a set of keys at him and blows him a kiss across the bar. “You’ll get over it,” she says.

Nick watches the guys at the bar watching her walk away, the same expression on their faces.

Nick’s sitting there, thinking about how certain people just have that ability to bewitch the people around them when a tall, good looking guy, probably a college boy, walks up to the bar to buy a beer and break a fifty.

Nick noticed him as soon as he came through the door and started playing pool at one of the tables. There’s something incongruous about him. His college-student hoodie and easy-going manner not fitting with the calculating way that he watches people, the constant awareness in his stance. And nobody looks that often over their shoulder without a reason.

He’s really hot too. Stupidly tall and fresh-faced, a betraying warmth along his cheeks when he’s playing an important shot, at odds with the cool inscrutability of his expression. There if you’re looking close enough. He’s been quietly holding court at the corner table since he arrived.

Nick has occasionally dipped into the male pool. One time, two states over and a million years ago, he actually shacked up with a guy for all of two months. It didn’t end well. Men are as unfathomable as women.

Nick has emptied the line of shots and is unembarrassed by the fact that he’s openly looking.

The guy pretends to ignore him, then turns to meet Nick’s gaze. “Something I can help you with?” His tone is wary rather than confrontational, curious.

Up close he’s even more interesting and definitely prettier. The incongruity is still there, experience and cynicism in the twist of his mouth and the look in his eyes, in spite of his youth. He looks like he’s seen things he shouldn’t have way too early in his life.

“Hi, I’m Nick.”

Nick watches the barely perceptible pause before he replies, “Sam.”

It crosses Nick’s mind that maybe for a spilt second he was thinking about giving him a false name. “You’re a con-artist, Sam,” Nick says bluntly.

Sam’s expression instantly shuts down. He stands up from where he was leaning against the bar and pulls up to his full height. It’s not meant to be intimidating, though. Nick doesn’t think that he’s even aware of how threatening his height could be if he was trying. He just looks cautious and a little uncertain.

Nick leans back a little, his body language open, closer to suggestive than challenging. “The way you play, it’s a scam, a lie. You’re playing for the money not for the game.”

Sam picks up the beer and change when it’s placed in front of him. He looks over at Nick. “I’m not a cheat, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“I’m not implying anything. Just stating a fact. I don’t have a problem with it. A person’s got the right to make a little easy money.” Nick looks over at the guys Sam’s been fleecing. “Especially when it’s being made off frat boys.” He looks back at Sam. “It’s a pity, though. I’d like to see your game when you really mean it.”

Sam’s mouth twists into a derisive smile. “I’m not interested in showing off. I do need the money. The game offers me somewhere to stay and something to eat for the next few days. That’s all. But you already know that, so why are we talking?”

People who have been forced by fate and circumstances to live by their wits recognize each other. Nick has learned this on his travels. They’re different from other people, but shared experience doesn’t mean they necessarily feel an affinity for each other. “Okay, I’ll put down two hundred to see you play for real.”

Sam looks undecided then shrugs and nods his head.

He’s even better than Nick suspected, clearing the table from the first break. “It would’ve been nice to play just a single shot,” he says, laughing.

Sam pockets the wad of bills that Nick hands over. “You wanted to see it. That’s how I play when I really mean it.”

He looks like he’s making to leave. Nick doesn’t want him to. There’s something fascinating about Sam’s caginess. He’d like to scratch beneath the surface of this guy, or maybe get him naked and vulnerable, at least see what a real, involuntary expression looks like on his face. Nick’s not sure how to make that happen. He’s been with guys before, but the rules of hooking up with men are different than those with women, especially in straight environments. He’s never quite mastered them. Sam is into him. Nick can tell from the way Sam looks at him, quick, furtive glances down at his body when he’s supposed to be looking at his face. And his defensiveness is partly the result of attraction. Since they started talking, Nick has felt hyper-aware, his skin prickling, nostrils flaring like he can smell Sam, his heart beating a little too fast. An animal response that comes from the desire to fuck, to lose yourself in a person.

“Let me buy you a beer,” he says, going with the universal staple of pick-up lines.

Sam looks hesitant.

“C’mon, I’m buying, even after you almost cleaned me out.”

Sam shrugs again in acceptance. “Okay.” They head towards the bar. “I’m going to hit the can first,” Sam says and walks off in the direction of the toilets.

Nick’s feeling of triumph dissipates when Sam doesn’t reappear. He turns around to glance at the door to the men’s room for the third time in the space of a couple of minutes. This time he notices that the frat boys Sam was playing earlier are missing from the corner table. It’s possible that Sam’s failure to return from the toilet is connected to their disappearance and not to Nick patiently waiting for him at the bar. Nick takes a minute to get over his ego and then goes to check on Sam’s whereabouts, mostly because he’s curious and wants to make sure that he hasn’t been ditched.

The bathroom is empty. A fire exit leads off from the corridor between the toilets and the bar. Loud, angry voices meet Nick when he pushes it open. Sam’s got his back against the alley wall, talking quickly and quietly as he tries to cool the anger of the five guys that have him cornered. Nobody notices Nick.

The tense atmosphere splinters into impending violence when one of the frat boys steps forward and repeats something similar to Nick’s earlier words. His accusations of lying and cheating get lost in the sounds of encouragement from his friends. He unbuckles his belt, pulls it loose and wraps one end of it around his hand, the buckle hanging from the other end.

Nick’s thinking about stepping forward and making his presence known but something makes him hesitate. It’s not that he’s a coward. Of all the insults that have been levelled at him in his life, and there have been many, cowardice has never been one of them. But neither is he normally motivated by altruism. Watch your own back is the lesson he’s learned. He’s still considering what to do when he notices a change in Sam’s cool, controlled expression. He starts grimly smiling, like he’s actually a little amused by where the situation is going. It’s not exactly the reaction Nick would have expected from somebody about to get whipped by the nasty end of a belt.

But then Nick wasn’t expecting this college boy to suddenly turn into a martial arts master in front of him either. It happens in a quick blur. Sam grabs the belt as it’s flicked at him and pulls the guy forward, elbowing him in the face and knocking him to the ground. The other guys rush him and Sam just deals with them as if they’re moving in slow motion. He kicks, knees, elbows and punches like he’s been trained to use his body as a weapon. The way he moves is some hybrid of martial arts with street-fighting. It’s about the most surprising and hottest thing that Nick has ever witnessed.

Nick’s standing there in the dark watching Sam quietly discourage a stubborn, bleeding frat boy from getting up again when he notices another guy sneaking up behind Sam in the alleyway. He must have come from the front entrance of the bar. The guy picks up a beer bottle from a crate of empties as he slips past it and blends into the darkness behind Sam. Nick tracks the movement of his shadow, considers it for a moment, then picks up a plastic beer crate next to him. He takes a run at the shadowed silhouette and smacks it hard into the wall. There’s a satisfying thud as the guy hits the wall and collapses to the ground.

Sam whips around, his eye wide and dangerous.

“Hey,” Nick drops the crate and steps back, hands open. “Remember me?”

Sam gives him a dark, suspicious look and rubs the knuckles of his right hand. “Sure, you’re the guy who was coming on to me inside and then just stood by watching me get out-numbered and cornered, right? Did you enjoy the show?”

“I did, actually. You’ve got some pretty impressive moves. And it looked to me like they were the ones who were outnumbered, not you. Where did you learn to fight like that?”

Sam ignores him, turns away and looks down the dark alleyway to the well-lit street.

There’s no way Nick’s going to let him just walk away. “I’m also the guy who managed to overcome his own inherent sense of self-preservation to save you from getting a bottle to the back of the head.”

Sam snorts derisively. “Yeah, thanks. That was pretty heroic of you.”

“Never said I was heroic. Heroism is a bullshit idea sold by Hollywood movie directors and armed forces recruiters. Self-preservation is coded into our genes. There’s no shame in looking after number one.”

“So you finally decided to help me out because…”

“Because I didn’t want to see your pretty face cut up. My appreciation of beauty overcame my sense of self-preservation. I’m an aesthete like that.” Nick snorts at his own joke, thinking about how his very recent ex-girlfriend had laboriously explained the term to him.

Sam looks at him in disbelief, and then laughs. “You’re kidding, right? You’re still trying to hit on me? You’re unbelievable, man.”

Nick decides to lay his cards on the table. He’s buzzing with adrenaline and doesn’t feel like playing games. “I’m staying at a friend’s place tonight. I happen to know that she always keeps a bottle of tequila in the cupboard. You could come back with me. We could get really drunk and have incredible, uninhibited sex in her bed, which will probably piss her off. Actually, knowing Emily, she’d probably get a kick out of it. That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.”

Sam looks dumbstruck. A flush spreads along his cheekbones, possibly from anger. He opens his mouth to answer, but Nick cuts him off. “I want to fuck you. I think you’re intriguing. And I know you want to fuck me. Why pretend otherwise? Anyway, the way I see it, you owe me for rescuing you. A blow-job should cover it.”

He turns away and heads towards the street. There’s a moment of silence before he hears Sam’s footsteps following him. Sam catches up and they walk side-by-side in silence until Sam says, “I don’t owe you anything. Helping people out is a normal instinct. You have a totally screwed up view of human nature.”

Nick laughs. “You have no idea. Don’t tell me you’re one of these philanthropic, save-the-world types.”

Sam remains silent.

Nick suddenly feels a whole lot older than his years. Old and cynical. “You’ve just started college, right? You’ve signed up for various causes and believe that individuals can make a difference.”

“I don’t believe in causes. I just want to go to school. I got here today, stepped off the bus a couple of hours ago.”

Nick turns to look at him. “And you were in the bar hustling pool because you’ve run away from mommy and daddy or they’re some poor, small-town types who couldn’t afford to give you some cash for the trip and you’re their shining hope for the future?”

Sam comes to an abrupt stop and gives Nick a look that actually makes his blood run cold. Nick has spent time around violent men. He recognizes real menace when he sees it. How someone who appears so superficially innocuous can have these undercurrents of rage is kind of staggering.

Nick’s problem is that he’s attracted to danger. Warning signs only lure him closer. “I’m sorry. That was way out of line. I know nothing about you or how you got here. I’m just cynical about family, I guess. Another bullshit idea that we’re constantly indoctrinated with.” He pauses; he could just stop there, maybe walk away, but something about the wounded anger radiating from Sam makes him continue. “My dad never loved me, treated me like a freak when I was a little kid and then abandoned me and my mom. My whole life, I’ve felt like she was the only person who really understood me, the only thing that ever felt safe. And then I watched her die.”

Where the fuck that came from, Nick has no idea. He never talks like that. Never.

Sam’s look of surprise is quickly replaced by one of understanding. It’s a spell-bound moment. Two complete strangers facing each other on a darkened street in a place where neither of them belongs.

Nick reaches up, fits his hand into Sam’s nape and pulls him closer. It’s uncertain for a moment, a soft press of lips, before they open their mouths and their tongues tangle together. Sam draws a quick breath and makes this involuntary little sound. The sound of letting go.

Desire moves like a warm wave through Nick’s body. He grips Sam’s hip and presses their bodies together, tightens his hold on Sam’s neck and feels the tendons flex as Sam shifts his head, angling closer, his breath and tongue hot in Nick’s mouth.

Sam pulls away first. “I walked away from my brother this morning. He’s the only person who has ever made me feel safe.”

He’s scared, Nick realizes. That’s what he hadn’t quite been able to put his finger on about Sam. He hides it well, but it’s there the whole time in the sound of his voice and the way he controls his expressions, as if his mind wants to keep straying somewhere else and he’s afraid that it will show.

“Why did you leave him, then?”

“I had to.”

Nick nods. He can understand that. “C’mon,” he says quietly. “There’s a bed and a bottle of tequila with our names on them.”

Sam falls into step beside him.

“Are you hungry? I make an awesome Elvis sandwich. We could eat before the drunken fucking.”

Sam laughs at his self-conscious tone. “An Elvis sandwich? I’m scared to ask.”

“Seriously?” Nick rolls his eyes. “You’ve never eaten an Elvis? Man, you haven’t lived. Or rather, you haven’t come close to dying of an instant heart attack from food. It’s filled with peanut butter, banana and bacon. You fry it in a pan with butter. Best damn sandwich you’ll ever survive eating.”

Sam laughs but he looks a little nervous. Nick doesn’t think it’s just about the Elvis sandwich.

Even after the sandwiches, the Elvis jokes, the half bottle of tequila, the comical absurdity of throwing Emily’s teddy bear collection off the bed as they pull at each other’s clothes, it’s still too intense and raw and strangely intimate for a casual, drunken fuck.

They’re not quite in synch with each other and it’s clumsy at first. Both of them trying to initiate and dominate at the same time, then backing off and waiting for the other to take the lead. But when Nick finally pulls Sam’s leg up and pushes inside him, it’s perfect. Sam throws his head back and clutches the pillows behind him, flushed and abandoned and lost in physical sensation. Nick watches the play of emotions across his face. Sam’s eyes stay closed the whole time, his expression open. He clenches his jaw when it hurts at first and opens his mouth in big gasping breaths when it gets really good. Nick lowers himself and rubs his body against Sam’s as he thrusts into him, his mouth close to Sam’s and swallowing his quickening pants.

When Sam comes, he opens his eyes, glazed and unseeing, and bites Nick’s lip hard enough to draw blood. He falls back against the pillows afterwards, a tiny red smear on his upper lip, breathing hard, looking devastated. Nick keeps going, holding onto his orgasm long enough to see Sam grimace and groan, “Fuck,” over and over. He can’t hold on very long and seals Sam’s mouth with his, not allowing him to breathe, as he comes.

Nick collapses next to Sam, and once he’s caught his breath, he looks over to see that Sam is watching him. “Hey,” he says.

Sam smiles. “Hey.”

“Do you want to spend the night?” He doesn’t think Sam actually has anywhere else to go.

“Is that okay? What about your friend?”

Nick wipes the sheet across his stomach, wet with Sam’s come. “Emily’s going to kick my ass for the jizz stains on her sheets, but I’ll deal with her. She’ll be okay. Ultimately, Emily is a supporter of great sex, whoever’s getting it.” He looks closely at Sam. “And that was great sex.”

Sam blushes slightly and nods. “Yeah, it was.”

Nick turns over onto his side to switch off the bedside lamp. “Do you want the bear or the duck?” he asks Sam over his shoulder.

“Huh?”

“To sleep with. Do you want the duck or the teddy bear? They’re just lying here on the floor, forlorn looking. I don’t think Emily will be happy that we left them out in the cold.”

Sam laughs. “Good night, Nick.” He hesitates before saying, “Uh, thanks, you know? For kind of helping me out in the alleyway and then for this.”

“Sure,” he replies. “Good night, Sam.”

Sam leaves him a note in the morning. It’s friendly, but brief, and Nick doubts that he’ll ever see Sam again.

Emily does berate him for the come stains on her sheets, for drinking her tequila and making a complete mess of the kitchen, but she lets him stay at her apartment for the couple of days that it takes him to get himself sorted out and his van packed. She cries when he leaves and insists that he send her a postcard every month from wherever he ends up.

It’s a promise that he keeps for the next year.

He spends most of that year in Mexico. It’s a country that accepts him. In Mexico he’s just another misfit running away from something and trying to get lost. Nick’s a smart guy, hardened and astute, and there are always opportunities for men like him who show initiative and are flexible about legal and moral boundaries.

The next couple of years are a dark time for him, although he probably only fully recognizes that in hindsight.

It isn’t a single event that turns things around, but that’s always the way that he remembers it.

One morning he wakes up in a house in L.A. after a drug-fuelled party and finds a dead girl in the bathroom when he goes for a pee. She OD’ed some time during the night.

Maybe it’s because she’s young and pretty. Maybe it’s just an accumulation of many sordid, tragic events. Or maybe he isn’t as cynical and emotionally detached as he thinks he is. Whatever it is, standing over the girl’s dead body, he makes a decision.

It’s a decision that brings him home for the first time in almost eight years.

It’s difficult settling into a normal life at first. He has spent so long wandering, anonymous and responsible to no one, that he has to relearn the codes of behavior that govern ordinary people’s interactions. But Nick has always been a quick study and a good actor. He moves into his Mom’s house after the tenants have been given notice and picks up a job at the local hardware store.

He meets Sarah a year later. She kind of takes him by surprise because she’s unlike anybody that he has ever met before. She’s fiercely independent and pragmatic and she’s the first person he’s known who doesn’t seem to require anything from him. And she laughs at him. A lot. He can’t be maudlin and introspective around her. She doesn’t want to know about his past because she’s the kind of person who lives absolutely in the present. It’s liberating. He gets swept up in her wake and loves her desperately for it.

Sometimes he has to get away and be on his own, and she allows him that, barely seems to notice his absences. Until he needs them less and less. And after his son is born, he can’t bear the thought of being away from them. He spends nights in the nursery talking to his boy, promising to always be there for him, to never be like his own father. He starts to pray again, something he hasn’t done since he lost his faith at the age of eleven. For the first time since he was a kid, Nick starts to believe in his own happy ending. He starts to believe that this overwhelming thing he has always felt pursued by might just be a figment of his imagination.

He doesn’t really remember that night. It’s almost completely wiped from his memory. He knows that Mrs Fisher, aged and infirm, heard him howling like an animal from next door, hobbled up the stairs and found him holding his son’s little body on the nursery floor. He can vaguely remember lights and sirens and a stream of people moving through the house. He remembers not being able to understand anything they said to him as if he’d gone deaf or they were speaking another language. He knows that he had to be sedated. Everything else is a blank. Mrs Fisher tells him that it’s a blessing.

When Sarah comes to him on the night that he has the familiar childhood nightmare of being buried alive and he wakes to blood in his bed, he isn’t surprised. He’d always known, even if he allowed himself to briefly forget and imagine that it could have been different.

*******

Sam recognizes Lucifer’s other vessel, of course, but he doesn’t tell Dean, and it becomes just another secret in a succession of lies and deceptions and omissions. If he’d had a sense of humor left, he might even have laughed at the knowledge that he’d slept with Nick on the single night when he was the most afraid and the most excited about the possibility of a future that he could make his own, something new and different and just his.

The End


End file.
